10.6.06
Why art...
How can visual thinking help students enrich their understandings or re-conceptualize the world in which they live? More to the point, can visual thinking enhance intellectual inquiry? Especially as the pursuit of art does not correlate with scholarly activity? The correspondences and differences between academic and creative endeavor prove instructive, however.
As any new student approaches the terra incognito of the blank page, his/her inclination is to project a set of assumptions borne of unquestioned ideas. To learn how to draw — not re-create an image realistically — but to understand complex or abstract spatial arrangements, posit new relationships, invoke the unexpected, challenge perception, arrive at pure truth or assert its total absence, the student will need to learn how to see. This cannot be taught through words; it can only happens by doing. In this, the hand teaches the eye.
Where it is very good to debate philosophically aesthetic value or the possibility of apotheosis, it is another thing to express similar thoughts largely in non-verbal metaphor. It is another thing to evacuate metaphor and subsume oneself in process. So the atheist may momentarily find God or the believer indulge in apostasy. The terra incognito often provides a venue to test fast-held beliefs, to transgress self-prescribed confines.
As the artist evolves, he/she is engaged in a constant struggle, often trying to unite polarized concepts or methodological approaches. Ideological struggle often underlies in each individual artist’s work. These struggles, however, are not dictated alone by the accepted aphorisms of the time; stimulated by larger contexts and personal experience, there is a level of unconsciousness -- the very thing that Plato found in artistic production unconscionable.* The artist acts as filter for disparate, sometimes contradictory truths.
*While Plato disparaged all artists and poets (for asserting truths without understanding their origin), his philosophy falters when he asserts that through dialectic inquiry and the search for pure truth, the philosopher may ultimately make the “ultimate leap of the good.” In this, there is a suggestion that analytic inquiry is aided by “leaps” — and here one must assume the implication is of moving beyond what is known, engaging that which has not yet been governed within the framework of one’s philosphy. Dare one compare this sudden epiphany with ecstatic practice? Or perhaps free association, random conjecture .. the foibles of the imagination? It seems that Plato would wish very much to have his cake and eat it too .. to realize transformation (traditionally accessed through ecstatic religious practice, artistic endeavor or visiting nature in all its cataclysmic glory) while asserting that only one narrow path of inquiry leads to sublime truth.
Where I do not believe that art allows the practitioner to arrive at truth in a more efficient manner and where I agree with Plato on some level — the truths of artists are messy — yet I think the idea of allowing associations to suggest themselves, or turning one’s eye elsewhere can only be of benefit to so many different realms of thought. In addition, as we live in a very visual word — and as increasingly information is distributed spatially in ways that suggest new relationships — the practice of art not by the few but the many can only be of benefit.
As any new student approaches the terra incognito of the blank page, his/her inclination is to project a set of assumptions borne of unquestioned ideas. To learn how to draw — not re-create an image realistically — but to understand complex or abstract spatial arrangements, posit new relationships, invoke the unexpected, challenge perception, arrive at pure truth or assert its total absence, the student will need to learn how to see. This cannot be taught through words; it can only happens by doing. In this, the hand teaches the eye.
Where it is very good to debate philosophically aesthetic value or the possibility of apotheosis, it is another thing to express similar thoughts largely in non-verbal metaphor. It is another thing to evacuate metaphor and subsume oneself in process. So the atheist may momentarily find God or the believer indulge in apostasy. The terra incognito often provides a venue to test fast-held beliefs, to transgress self-prescribed confines.
As the artist evolves, he/she is engaged in a constant struggle, often trying to unite polarized concepts or methodological approaches. Ideological struggle often underlies in each individual artist’s work. These struggles, however, are not dictated alone by the accepted aphorisms of the time; stimulated by larger contexts and personal experience, there is a level of unconsciousness -- the very thing that Plato found in artistic production unconscionable.* The artist acts as filter for disparate, sometimes contradictory truths.
*While Plato disparaged all artists and poets (for asserting truths without understanding their origin), his philosophy falters when he asserts that through dialectic inquiry and the search for pure truth, the philosopher may ultimately make the “ultimate leap of the good.” In this, there is a suggestion that analytic inquiry is aided by “leaps” — and here one must assume the implication is of moving beyond what is known, engaging that which has not yet been governed within the framework of one’s philosphy. Dare one compare this sudden epiphany with ecstatic practice? Or perhaps free association, random conjecture .. the foibles of the imagination? It seems that Plato would wish very much to have his cake and eat it too .. to realize transformation (traditionally accessed through ecstatic religious practice, artistic endeavor or visiting nature in all its cataclysmic glory) while asserting that only one narrow path of inquiry leads to sublime truth.
Where I do not believe that art allows the practitioner to arrive at truth in a more efficient manner and where I agree with Plato on some level — the truths of artists are messy — yet I think the idea of allowing associations to suggest themselves, or turning one’s eye elsewhere can only be of benefit to so many different realms of thought. In addition, as we live in a very visual word — and as increasingly information is distributed spatially in ways that suggest new relationships — the practice of art not by the few but the many can only be of benefit.
